Niri is amazing:

• Overview just feels right to manage windows, hyprland for example lacks that feature and due other issues even existing plugins can't be used anymore (hyprland dev borked support)
• Scrolling desktops is a weird concept, but surprisingly works well. Had to move back to hyprland after half a year on Niri and I just can't get used to it. What do you mean space on my desktop is limited?
• It have all bells and whistles that hyprland have, like custom animations, blur (was recently added after a lot of users cried a lot), you can even write own shaders for windows opening\closing

But: Still in development, some features broken or not exists. Blur for example was added in hurry, so visual bugs with it is common. HDR is not supported. Another thing that actually forced me to switch - bit depth control is not supported (patch for that was proposed half a year ago and only recently was merged, so it should be in new release), cause of that my monitor always tries to set 16bit color space, which is obviosly imposible thru hdmi and with my TV, so after booting up niri I always have black screen (or not, sometimes it reverts to defaults which is 8 bit and for HDR\to use my monitor you ideally need 10, so it's a mess). And there some additional small things, like no way to trigger something on desktop\window switch, small things like that, which usually do exist in tailing managers.

But beyond that, it's awesome and I hope dev continue. It milions time better than hyprland just because they haven't changed damn config scheme 3 time in a focking row.

And crucially, it is written entirely in Rust. Which could be a deciding point for some.

I am a programmer, and in my opinion, unless you are planning at looking at the source code and don't want to mess with other languages, you as a user should not care about whether the program you're about to use is written in Rust.

::: spoiler Wall of text with context Rust has become popular among programming enthusiasts due to resulting in fast programs while avoiding memory management problems that come from using some other "fast" languages such as C. Not just that, but Rust achieves that while also avoiding the most common approach to this problem, which is garbage collection. Garbage collection is often seen as slow, despite, when compared to C's manual memory management, garbage collection not being that far behind when well optimized. That's why some Rust enthusiasts write that their Rust programs are "Blazingly Fast 🔥", instead of writing "very fast" like everyone else. Those same enthusiasts take the fact that, as I've said before, Rust avoids the memory management problems from some "fast" languages such as C, and advertise it as "Rust makes programs safer and remove entire classes of bugs while keeping it fast". None of these "ads" are wrong, but they can be a bit misleading to those who don't know much about programming.

First of all, a programmer can definitely make slow and buggy programs with Rust. Rust "fights" against bad memory management, but that's a small part of the issues that can rise from bad programming. Any programming language can try to "fight" bad programming practices (something that Rust tries to do), but there's always a limit to how much bad habits you can catch. Secondly, Rust isn't the only language that can offer fast, memory-safe programs. I've heard about benchmarks that showed that OCaml is one of the "fastest" programming languages, and it's a language that uses garbage collection. Many other examples exist. Heck, I've even heard of guidelines for fast memory-unsafe programming languages to avoid memory managent problems (here's an example https://misra.org.uk/).

I'm not saying this because I hate Rust, or anything. Rust is a really cool programming language that seems to be really useful for memory-constrained environments. However, just like any other programming language, it's a tool, not a magic wand. As such, please don't treat it like a miraculous solution to make your programs faster and less buggy. :::

You should instead look at how much care the developers put into their own programs. Now that's a good deciding point for whether to install a program.

Happy hacking! :)

(P.S.: please correct me if I wrote anything wrong)

Laughs in 15 virtual desktops

Niri & Noctalia are awesome. It's not quite as easy to configure as Cosmic Desktop, but the paradigm works way better and faster when you get used to it.

I was also a bit resistant to the idea, but somehow finally got it. Probably on the 5th try.

If you have ever lost track of your editor because Firefox decided to squish it into a 200-pixel-wide column, you know exactly how jarring that can be.

so, instead, your terminal is lost off the edge of the screen.

doesn't tabbed window layout address this issue?

I guess this is more like if tabbed window layout doesn't fit your brain model, here is an alternative that maybe does, i just struggle to find much of a difference. maybe this is just easy mode for split window tabs?

either way, i love that there are options.

Niri was the first tiling wm that really clicked with me. It with noctalia are now my go-to laptop setup.

But it's a scrolling wm...

I loved niri as a long-time i3 user, but once the novelty of it faded, I realized it was mostly its GNOME-like features that charmed me, like pressing Meta for "explode" view and dynamic workspace management, while the actual tiling and window management wasn't as streamlined for me (especially stacking thinga vertically).

Sometimes I also miss the quality-of-life of a full DE, like dynamically switching from light to dark mode, but that can arguably be achieved in some other way - or even running i3 under a DE.

Sometime when I upgrade from my trusty old Nvidia GPU, I might switch to sway, but as of now, nothing has managed to topple i3 for me.

I'd love to try Niri. The only Wayland compositor that I have used for a long term is Hyprland, and it was an awful experience for me; I found it a little difficult to configure.

Looks interesting, and I thought KDE when? But, of course, it's already there as Karousel. On the list of things to audit when I feel like futzing with UI again.

I want my xmonad to live for ever

I've tried WMs a number of times but the sheer amount of shit not working out of the box (or ever) is just awful.

I have Niri + Noctalia on my laptop rn and it's nice for most tasks, but so limited. configuring external monitors doesn't work right. the steam flatpak doesn't even display a window. the builtin clipboard manager doesn't work. Non-linux people watch me use this and they decide that linux is unusable.

I mean zero disrespect to any of the people building these fantastic tools but I keep crawling back to KDE Plasma. Am I doing something wrong hahah

The project is inspired by PaperWM, a GNOME Shell extension that brings scrollable tiling to GNOME.

🤮

I wish them all the best , except if they're part of fascist open source, in which case, they can get bent.

But then again, I have my KDE task manager so that it only shows tasks from the current screen on it, and even I sometimes find that disorientating.